nactabletopfandomcom-20200215-history
Session 9a (Stars of Io)
The party raided Zahz's House and then fought a dragon. Status *DM: Bryce *Players: **Raymond - Naiveral ***XP: 1,900 **Ryan - Wuelasselin ***XP: 1,900 **Paul - Gnarlimb ***XP: 1,900 **Shelley - Zem ***XP: 1,900 *Date: June 12, 2012 *Location: Ryan's Media Room Summary A Wild Zem Appears! The party retired to their Underdark Fortress and began making plans for their next move. Wuel began working on various rituals; curing Naiveral of being unaccountably peckish and enchanting some Jade Dragonflies that Gnarlimb had carved. As they were doing this a young halfling girl dropped in on them and began trying to convince them to help her pull of some sort of heist. Though the group was hesitant to trust the girl at firstRK1, eventually enough details were learned that they decided to at least look into completing her request. Slavery is bad, mmkay The group was then interrupted by a knock on the fortresses door. A group of slavers was trying to deliver a shipment of troggs to the previous owners. The party convinced the slavers that they were new hires and started leading the slavers through fortress. On one of the bridges the party turned on the slaversRK2 and slaughtered all but one of them... who got away. They then learned that the troggs were exiled from their home by their leader Alm(ahaldrillix?) a metallic dragon who has changed recently. The party asked the troggs to stay in the fortress for a little while and then lead them to their homeland. Raiding is fine though The party rested and the set out to Zahz's house to confirm Zem's story with one of Zahz's servants. They used their new magical dragonflies to access Zahz's balcony and with Zem's skills broke into the house. After the servant confirmed her story, the party began ransacking the house. They started in the library where Wuel found a nifty book and they dumped the rest of the books in the library into a bag of holding. They party then found a vault room. They discovered a secret vault behind a painting. They managed to unlock that vault which revealed a long hole in the wall. They searched the houseRK3. Found a vault key in a telescope room. In the telescope room they saw a magical scrying device powered by a piece of drow brain. THe party eventually set off an alarm. The then rushed through the rest of the ransacking. They smashed some extra brains they found. Smashed their way into a spellscar room, and burned what remained of the library. They found a portal gun that they used to access the vault and grabbed up all the goodies inside. They then flew away on their dragonfliesRK4. Flight As they were flying over the town, the blacksmith motioned them down to try to sell them some "dynomite". They bought a couple of bundles and then sped off toward their fortress. They decided not to tarry at the fortress for fear of Zahz tracking them down; they gathered their trogg party and ventured forth. On the way to trogg's homeland Zahz tried to teleport to them but was unable to force his way through the underdark teleportation suppression. After arriving at the troggish settlement they were greeted by the leader, Mossbeard McTroggerson, who explained that their sovereign, Alm, had sent them away I told them not to enter his home any more. The party convinced Mossbeard to lead them to Alm's cave anyway. In the Lair of Alm the Corrupted At Alm's came Wuel sense some strong spellplagued areas and the rest of the party stayed back in fear of plague. Wuel proceeded down a statuary corridor that led into a great cave corrupted by the Spellplague. Wuel called out to the dragon who attacked. Hearing Wuel's cries for asssistance the rest of the party sped through the statutory corridor to fight the dragon. Infected with the Spellplague, Alm's normally lustrous scales were covered with a shimmering, multicolored film, like oil on water. His legs had degenerated and his wings partially fused with his torso, giving him a more wurmlike look. As Wuel attempted to cast spells through the bubbles of plague, an arcane reaction pulled extraplanar creatures into the fight (two phase spiders at first, followed by a strange tentacled creature). While the phase spiders had difficulty moving in the strange non-gravity of the plague bubble, eventually one consumed the other and mutated into a creature more capable of navigating the space. At some point Zem jumped on Alm's back to hack away at his head. This dealt significant damage. Eventually, he attempted to squash her by rolling on his back. In the end, the party managed to incapacitate Alm, rendering him unconscious long enough to perform the ritual that would cleanse him of the spellplague's terrible taintRK5. Commentary *'DM OPENING COMMENTS' **I felt very uncertain going into this session and was pleased at the way it turned out. Never before have I had such a good idea of what you were planning to do for the session, and as such I did not prepare any contingency plans. There was only one path that I could see that led to you guys getting the crown this session and not ending in a TPW, and you guys followed it admirably. It seemed as though I was railroading you badly this session, but I didn't get any feedback that suggested that, so I guess it was ok. Maybe that is just the nature of the underdark, not a lot of options to go exploring. ***'RK:' I don't think it counts as railroading if you know what our plans are and base your plans around it. * RK1 **We ALL need to work on our ability to integrate our characters into a group. It is something that every group we've tried to put together has had trouble with. * RK2 **I liked this fight. I think that having it on the bridge made it more interesting than it would have been anywhere else in the Dwarf Fortress. * RK3 **As everyone else has said, I feel like had the Brain room had an index we might have tried to use them some. ***'DM NOTE:' To me it seemed that you guys were not really interested in investigating this room very much. Maybe I misread your intent here, but it seemed that you were all a little nervous and not really investigating very thoroughly in here. I got the feeling that you were looking for an obvious identification system, and felt like it wasn't worth the time it would take to decipher the markings. You could have got some info from this. ****'RK:' Of course we were nervous. We were ransacking the home of a person who LIQUIFIED a party member, and then we stumbled into a room full of BRAINS IN JARS. There was plenty of reason to be nervous. * RK4 **I'm really liking these Dragonflies. * RK5 **This fight seemed a little on the simple side. Maybe because I'm simply made of Hit Points and Surges but the dragon didn't feel very dangerous. The Priestess with the spider wand seemed a more dangerous foe. ***'DM NOTE:' I wasn't sure how difficult this fight would turn out to be. I had to homebrew the spellchanged dragon, and I may have erred on the side of this fight being to easy. If you guys come up against a sane full strength dragon, i assure you the fight will be a real challenge. I also wish you had used the spellplauge bubbles more to your advantage. Some terrible early roles led to you guys avoiding what could have been an interesting combant element. **Gnarlimb's decision to weather the Spellplague to save the dragon was pretty cool. Good RP, Paul. ***'DM NOTE:' I also liked the way this turned out. SG: *I liked the portal gun. Had this gone smoother, I feel that we could have learned more information had we been able to take our time with the place. Experiment with more brains. I liked the telescope/brain-movie-projector idea. PP: *The slaver fight was a very smooth way of dropping in the trogs for the Alm connection, I didn't even realize that was what you had done until summarizing it. **'DM NOTE:' I almost facepalmed myself when you guys finished this fight. Someone said, "Be free trogs!" If you guys had let them go without talking to them, finding that dragon would have been a real ordeal. *Sneaking around in Zahz's manor was fun, it was nice to feel kind of like a spy without having to pull off a lot of difficult stealth checks and stuff. It had some nice little puzzles while still feeling natural. I would have been a lot more inclined to examine the extra brains if they were marked in a more descriptive way since there were so many seemingly random ones. I honestly didn't even expected you to plan any visions for them. *I'm going to include all my Alm commentary here: The fight was a lot of fun. The corruption and the cave and the dragon elements reminded me of Metroid. I would have really liked some more details about the spellplague bubbles, Alm's appearance, the trog village, etc., so maybe I'll start asking for it in game instead of always bringing it up here after the fact. I was expecting something a little more unnatural from Alm in his attacks while he was corrupted, especially after you said they get special powers from eating their horde or something. You could have thrown in some really unexpected stuff there. Lastly, the victory was so much sweeter since we were able to cure him at the end, so thanks. **'DM NOTE:' I know my details are one of my weak areas, and I will try to work on it. I can see all these things in my mind perfectly, and I get caught up in what I'm doing and forget that you can't see them the way i can. Asking for those detail will remind me to do my job and lead to a richer experience for everyone. Also, I thought about giving him extra powers from the horde, but if you see above, i was concerned about the difficulty of this fight already. I went for the "he was eating it out of some strange insanity induced compulsion, and not eating to gain the powers. Again, in the future i see more fights with sane, smart dragons that will really push you guys to the limit. Loot